There’s an interesting piece by K.A. Dilday over at Open Democracy. She’s far too soft on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but her analysis of the civil lawsuit against the French satirical political weekly Charlie Hebdo for publishing the Jyllands-Posten cartoons is balanced and informative.
Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia
Why socialists should resist Islamophobia
An excellent article by Deepa Kumar in the US Marxist journal International Socialist Review analyses the “orientalist” ideological roots and pro-imperialist mythology of Islamophobia. She concludes:
“Confronting Islamophobia and challenging American racism towards the people of the Middle East is an essential precondition for the rebirth of a strong antiwar movement…. And while Bush argues that ‘the calling of our generation’ is to fight ‘Islamofascism’, we need to assert instead that the calling of our generation is to build an anti-racist antiwar movement that can challenge the attacks on Muslims and Arabs domestically and that can stop U.S. imperialism in its tracks and shape the course of the twenty-first century. Our future, quite literally, depends on building such a movement.”
For orientalism, see also Grace Lally’s article in Socialist Worker, 24 February 2007
AMW concern over media coverage of King Fahad Academy
Arab Media Watch challenges the biased reporting of the King Fahad Academy case, and publishes extracts from the Ofsted report.
World’s soccer chiefs chicken out
Accusing of the International Football Association Board of “pointless cowardice” over the Asmahan Mansour case, the Montreal Gazette also lays into the Quebec Soccer Federation, who were responsible for banning her in the first place:
“You don’t have to be Muslim to wonder how a scarf, especially if tucked in at the neck, can be dangerous. One could even make a case that an exposed pony tail – common enough on the pitch – could conceivably be riskier than covered hair. So the Quebec Soccer Federation now needs to explain itself. Can it cite safety studies? Offer horrible examples of death by hijab? Provide any defence at all of this narrow-minded ruling? If not, it should reverse itself.”
Montreal Gazette, 6 March 2007
See also “FIFA hijab ruling deserves red card”, Edmonton Journal, 6 March 2007
Anti-terror laws: many arrested, few convicted
The Government’s campaign to tackle the “terrorist threat” was again questioned today as the Home Office released the latest statistics on individuals arrested under anti-terrorism laws. Of the 1,166 arrested in the UK since September 11 2001, only 40 have been convicted under anti-terrorism legislation. More than half of those suspected of being terrorists of one form or another have been released without any charge at all.
See also Press Association, 5 March 2007
Cleared, falsely accused, not guilty
When Muslims are charged with something the word Islam or Muslim is attached to whatever crime they are accused of, and the story makes the front page headlines, when they are found not guilty or innocent, that goes somewhere on the back pages in small print.
Sheila Musaji lists some examples.
GALHA continues to incite anti-Muslim bigotry
“The word ‘appeasement’ is rarely used except in the context of Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler in 1938, but what about the present appeasement of Muslims in Britain? … We are told that Islam itself cannot be blamed for the terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, and London, followed by widespread carnage in retaliation for the publication of a few innocuous drawings. That is like saying that the horrors of the Inquisition had nothing to do with Christianity….
“Islam has failed to moderate its cruel practices to the extent that mainstream Christianity has done in the past couple of centuries. The Taliban, Al-Qa’eda, and the Badr Corps are certainly extremist, but they are orthodox, deriving logically from the Koran, which denigrates women and tells believers to wage jihad against heretics and infidels.”
Barbara Smoker, the former long-time president of the National Secular Society, writes in the latest issue of (pdf) Gay Humanist Quarterly.
GHQ is edited by Brett Lock of OutRage! by the way.
Readers of Islamophobia Watch will no doubt also be aware that the publishers of GHQ, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, underwent an acrimonious split in 2005 over the publication of racist anti-Muslim material in their then magazine Gay and Lesbian Humanist. (See here, here, here, here, here and here.) GHQ is published by the faction within GALHA who supposedly rejected Islamophobic bigotry! Perhaps the two sides should consider getting back together.
It might be noted that in addition to Barbara Smoker GALHA’s vice-presidents include Labour MEP Michael Cashman, Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris and London Assembly member Darren Johnson of the Green Party. It might be an idea to draw their attention to the contents of GALHA’s current magazine.
Update: For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 7 March 2007
Fear of Muslims declines when all sides put their case
Australians’ worries about the threat of terrorism posed by Muslims falls dramatically once they have a chance to hear all sides of the issue. That is the finding of before-and-after polling of 329 randomly selected people who attended a national conference on attitudes to Muslims in Canberra at the weekend.
The “national deliberative poll” taken before the conference found 49 per cent thought incompatibility between Muslim and Western values was a big contributor to terrorism. That figure fell to 22 per cent when the same people were polled yesterday, after spending two days hearing views ranging from hostile to sympathetic about the presence of Islam in Australia.
A similar trend emerged on related issues. Before the conference 44 per cent thought Muslims coming to Australia had made a bad impact on national security; that dropped to 23 per cent yesterday. More than one third thought beforehand that Muslims were a threat to the Australian way of life, but that fell to 21 per cent.
National Secular Society has descended into farce
“It’s pretty clear that the NSS have lost their way, and now come across as an extremely bitter bunch of people railing against the religious in manner in which they would heap opprobrium if it was the other way round.”
Osama Saeed takes on Terry Sanderson and the NSS.
Europe muzzles Muslim intellectuals
Several prominent Muslim intellectuals are increasingly being barred from addressing international gatherings and delivering lectures across Europe on the grounds of extremism or anti-Semitism.
“We face many hurdles while planning for our annual Bourget conference,” Lhaj Thami Breze, Chairman of the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), told IslamOnline.net. “We want to invite prominent Muslim scholars from around the world but are always confronted with a long blacklist of people we can not invite.”
The four-day Bourget conference, the biggest Muslim convention in Europe, attracted last year more than 150,000 Muslims from across the continent. “Many moderate Muslims from the East and West, including prominent European thinkers, are banned from attending,” Breze said.
He cited Swiss-based prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and his brother Hany, the director of the Islamic Center in Geneva.